At Home on Hendrik

I never thought I’d be so happy about being able to do the washing up. After weeks without running water I enlisted the help of our friend Alex and attacked the pump again.

Job one was to hoik the busted pump up onto deck and strip it down so we could replace the damaged seal. At least two people passing by on the mooring commented “that’s a very old pump,” although it was only built in 1988. But it is an old design, made of cast iron, and it weighs about as much as me.

Lots of swearing later, we had the old seal out for comparison with the new one:

That’ll be the problem then. A quick clean with some diesel and we had it back in one piece ready to set back in place.

The next thing to do was brim the water tanks to ensure a decent head of water in the pipe to the pump, so we took about an hour to do the usual bailing out job. While that was going on I reorganised the storage hold because when two people independently tell you the boat seems to be listing at high tide, you take notice. Keeping the tanks flat will help to keep the pump well fed too.

There’s something we’ve been neglecting to tell you. See, a few weeks ago we had a few friends over and as usual, we gave them the full tour. And while I was down in the engine room waving the work light around and waxing lyrical about Scania engines I suddenly realised that over in the corner there was… ANOTHERWATERPUMPIDENTICAL TO THEBROKENONE. Nikolaj, our incredible neighbour/superman helped us hook it up but to no avail. There might be some broken seals, but I had been hoping that it just wasn’t getting any water from the tank and brimming it would solve the problem. It didn’t, but I’m still not convinced this other pump is broken.

But for the sake of time, we pulled the backup off the mounts and hooked up the original pump, filled its oil tank, used the hose to prime it, crossed our fingers and spent half an hour arguing about whether the pressure gauge was climbing quickly enough. And did it work?

YES! WE HAVE WATER!

And better still we now have a water system that we can plug the hot water straight into – and the boiler and its parts are all on order now. We’re that bit closer to steaming hot showers.

In other news visitors to the boat are now greeted on entry with our policies in No Uncertain Terms: